There were voices in there.
Suddenly, the lab was very cold. Zelenka found himself edging away from the terminal, straining to hear what the voices were saying but dreading making out the actual words. It wasn’t easy; there were many voices, whispers, hissing over and through each other like the mindless sibilance of snakes. Dozens, hundreds of voices… He strained to hear, his skin crawling, trying not to remember the cold echoes of an attic in Prague as the whispers grew louder, edging towards comprehension.
It was too much. He moaned in horror, reached out to switch the speakers off and almost screamed as he saw the figure reflected in the terminal’s screen. There was someone behind him!
He whirled. Sam Carter was in the lab doorway, a puzzled frown knitting her brow. “My God, Radek. What in the world?”
For a moment, Zelenka just sat there, heart bouncing, breath frozen in his throat. Then his lungs decided to release him, and he let out a shuddering breath. “Colonel.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes,” he croaked. He turned down the volume. “Yes, I’m fine. You’re up late…”
She drew closer, looking concerned. “I’ve been up arguing with Fallon about the tech team for Angelus. I was just going to get some sleep when the biosensors flagged somebody still in here, so I came down to check it out… What are you still doing up?”
“Working.” He rolled his seat back on its castors. “Trying to track down the power drains. I guess I must have gotten caught up.”
“Yeah, but what in?” Carter pulled up a nearby seat and sat next to him, peering at the screen. “What was that awful noise?”
He took a deep breath. “As far as I can tell it’s what’s underlying the forty-one second cycle of the drain pulses. There’s a very faint pattern there that I’ve been trying to identify, and it’s going through frequency analysis right now. I just thought I’d see what it sounded like.” He shivered. “I wish I hadn’t, now.”
“I’ve got to admit, it did sound pretty freaky.” Carter gave him a smile. “Let’s hear it again.”
“Do we have to?”
She nodded. Reluctantly, Zelenka raised the volume again.
He watched Carter’s face as she listened, her forehead creased in concentration, light from the monitor playing patterns on her skin. “That’s so odd,” she breathed, finally. “It almost sounds like…”
“Voices?”
She gave him a startled look. “You hear that too? I thought it was just me.”
“Whispering. And I think I may have…” He shook his head. “No.”
“What?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Doctor, it may seem unimportant, but this situation is mysterious enough without us keeping secrets from one another. What were you going to say?”
He straightened his glasses. “Okay. But Colonel, if I tell you something strange, will you promise not to have Doctor Keller evaluate me?”
She raised an eyebrow. “How strange are we talking here?”
“When I was young… Younger, back in Prague. There was a fellow student of mine in the university. Bedřich, although we called him- No, never mind.” He chuckled abruptly, then stopped, aware of how hollow his voice sounded. “One winter, Bedřich stopped turning up to his lectures. I became worried, so I visited him.”
Carter was gazing at him quite intently. “Go on.”
Zelenka shrugged. “His father had a large house, much larger than mine, in the Malá Strana. It had an attic… Bedřich was up there, he was spending all his time there, his father said. His wife, Bedřich’s mother, had died, you see, and Bedřich had a tape recorder.”
“A what?”
“One of those, what are they called? The old kind, with the big reels. He was disconnecting the microphone, letting the tapes record all the way through, and then listening to the tapes. Over and over again, listening to the blank tapes he’d recorded. Trying to hear…”
“Hear what?”
“His mother.”
“Oh my God,” she said quietly. “EVP.”
Zelenka sighed. “Yes, I read up on it later, after Bedřich went to hospital. Trying to record the voices of the dead on tape… I even listened to one of his tapes. He said it had his mother’s voice on it, but I didn’t hear her. I heard…” He paused, and looked away.
“Radek… What did you hear?”
Zelenka nodded at the terminal. “That.”
Carter looked at him for a few seconds, then reached out and turned the volume down again. “Okay, now that we’ve completely freaked ourselves out, what do you say we pick this up again in the morning? When the lights are —”
Half the computers in the lab went dark.
Zelenka jumped up from his chair. It went skittering back on its casters. “Kurva,” he gasped.
Carter was on her feet too, looking wildly about as the dark computers began to boot themselves up again. “What’s happened? How did that happen?”
He shook his head. His heart was yammering behind his ribs, the pulse beating in his ears… “Oh, the pulse!”
“The what?”
“What I’ve spent all day working on!” He took the audio signal completely offline and brought up the timing track of the power drains. A quick look at his watch confirmed what had happened. “It’s the power drain. It shut down all the computers that were running heavy loads. Their power supplies dropped out, so they rebooted.”
“That must mean the drain’s a lot bigger than it was,” Carter replied, staring at the screen. “Yeah, there it is. Damn, Radek, that’s a big jump.”
“Almost ten percent below baseline.”
“Not good. Let’s see if the next one is as bad…” She straightened up, her eyes still on the screen.
Zelenka counted down on his watch. “Okay, we’ll hit it again in three, two one…”
Nothing happened. This pulse was just as imperceptible as the others.
They stayed where they were for another few minutes, waiting for a bigger spike, but none appeared. It seemed, for the moment, that the drain on the city’s power had returned to its previous levels.
“That,” Carter told him, “is the damndest thing. But if it’s stabilized for now, I think it might be a good time to get some sleep.”
Zelenka thought about lying in the dark, trying not to hear whispering behind the rushing of blood in his ears. “Yeah, maybe I’ll stay up a little longer.”
“This will keep for a while, don’t you think?”
“I hope so. But right now, I need some fresh air.”
There was an open area on the way to Angelus’ lab; a long gallery, railed on four sides, surrounding a space in the pier amour. It was a kind of narrow cloister. McKay had mentioned it, while boasting to Zelenka about his rapport with the genius Ancient, but he had been characteristically dismissive. Zelenka, on the other hand, liked it a lot.
He could hear the sea from here, but it was a distant, comforting sound, not at all like the signal component and its tragic rushings. There must have been a fairly stiff breeze blowing across the city tonight — he was largely sheltered from it in the cloister, but if he listened closely, he could hear it whistle past some of the upper towers, and raise waves to slap against the pier’s armored flanks. It made him think of the Vltava, and rain on streets, and suddenly Zelenka wanted very much to go home.
He glanced up out of the opening, towards the core of the city. Hundreds, thousands of lights were on there, studding the towers, outlining their jumbled, angular forms in dots of bright gold. The highest lights were misty, almost lost to the darkness, but the center part of Atlantis was awash with them.
It was a strange sight, alien. After years as part of the expedition, still oddly unfamiliar. It gave him no comfort to see it. There was a coldness to the city, an antiseptic, inhuman feeling that he had never experienced anywhere else. It was as though the structure of the place was completely apart from the people that lived there, unaffected by them. Sure, they could hang pictures or play movies or set up beds and bookcases, but the walls remained unchanged, the floors and ceilings stayed exactly as they would be if no-one was there at all. Zelenka gazed up at the city of Atlantis and knew that if it wished, if it gained the will, it could wipe all traces of them away in an instant.